elcome to The Noble Tongue. This site is dedicated to promoting the technical study of Sindarin; the Welsh-inspired language of the late professor J.R.R. Tolkien. To further this cause I have compiled several articles, a few of which are my own, for presentation here. Much of the material on this site is necessarily theoretical but hopefully will be of use to scholars of one of Tolkien's most beloved languages. May the tongues of the Elves never die.

Accessibility
Accessibility of articles depends on ring colour: white, red, or black.Reading Notes: Being presentations or compilations, these articles are accessible to all readers. No specific knowledge regarding J.R.R. Tolkien’s invented world is needed.Analytical Articles: These articles provide a detailed overview of the theme they cover. However, they require some prior knowledge of the main works of J.R.R. Tolkien.Theoretical Articles: A comprehensive knowledge of the works of J.R.R. Tolkien is needed to fully understand articles in this category, the subjects treated being studied in minute detail by their authors.

Bertrand Bellet — August 2005Vowel affection is a prominent phonological process in the morphology of J. R. R. Tolkien’s Sindarin and Noldorin. This feature appeared in the late stages of his Gnomish and remained in his series of Welsh-inspired languages ever after. Its various kinds and the terminology used to describe them are first introduced cross-linguistically, with special reference to Celtic and Germanic languages.
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Bertrand Bellet — March 2005As Carl F. Hostetter and Patrick H. Wynne state in the foreword to their “Addenda and Corrigenda to the Etymologies”, “[t]he Etymologies is without question our most important source to date for the understanding of the internal history and relationships of Tolkien’s Elvish languages, as conceived and imaged by their creator during the drafting of The Lord of the Rings”.
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Bertrand Bellet — November 2004While most of the Sindarin (and earlier Noldorin) nouns and adjectives make their plural only with vowel changes, there is a small class of nouns that also add a syllable. Moreover, a handful of them have two forms in the singular: a shorter and a longer on which the plural is “regularly” built by vowel changes.
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Aaron Shaw & Rachel Shallit — June 2004The syntactic framework used here will be the so-called “X-bar” theory, which proposes that all phrases have the same basic structure: all phrases must have one head, may have one specifier, and may have one complement.
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Aaron Shaw — August 2003 article out of dateThis article is a derivative of my previous work with Florian “Lothenon” Dombach in which I aided in a “reconstruction” of the Sindarin Pronominal System. What follows is not a reconstruction “per se” but rather a collection of thoughts organized into a semi-coherent structure.
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Aaron Shaw & Florian “Lothenon” Dombach — March 2003 obsolete articleFrom the attested examples of the Corpus, the derivation of new personal pronouns seems to follow a general pattern. When we look at nîn besides lín and mín or ten besides men and even nin it seems clear that there is a distinct basic shape for each case, nominative, dative and possessive to which is added a characteristic consonant.
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Thorsten Renk — June 2004 needs some updatingThe following article is an attempt to present some ideas about the systematics of the Sindarin verb system. This article is intened as a guideline for people who want to use Sindarin to write texts and therefore often contains plausible (but unproven) speculations. The article uses the Noldorin of the Etymologies and the later Sindarin examples as sources.
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Thorsten Renk — March 2004 article out of dateMutations are one of the most prominent features of Sindarin, yet at the same time one that is at times extremely difficult to understand. This is certainly in part due to the fact that mutations can arise for a number of quite different reasons. It is the aim of this article to present some facts and some plausible conclusions about the nature of mutations in Sindarin.
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Thorsten Renk — February 2004 article out of dateThe purpose of this article is to demonstrate that the essential features of the Sindarin pronominal system can be predicted from a) the shape of the pronominal system in Quenya, b) the phonetical shifts going back from Quenya to Common Eldarin, and c) the phonetical shifts going from Common Eldarin to Sindarin. This is rather independent of grammatical interpretation (only well-known phonetical shifts are applied).
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Thorsten Renk — February 2004 article out of dateThe recently published issue of Parma Eldalaberon 14 contains rather complete writings about the grammar of early Qenya, a conceptual (in external timeline) predecessor of later Quenya. Since in these writings we actually get to see Tolkien give a complete description of a grammar system, we might hope to gain enough insights into the underlying concepts and ideas that in the end our analysis of mature Quenya (and eventually Sindarin) texts is better guided.
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Gabe Bloomfield — February 2004In our attested Sindarin/Noldorin corpus, there are many unfortunate instances where a lack of examples makes it very difficult to know a certain word, or how to use a certain grammar rule (such as the Noldorin word bui). However, there are also instances in the corpus where there are many examples of a certain word or grammar rule.
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Gabe Bloomfield — February 2004 needs some updatingOne key aspect of Sindarin, J.R.R. Tolkien’s invented grey-elven language, is the changing, or mutation, that an initial consonant undergoes when it is in a certain position. These changes have been termed ‘consonant mutations’, and it is a concept shared with Sindarin’s inspiration, Welsh.
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Gabe Bloomfield — February 2004 needs some updatingThe introduction of two theories that I have come up with, one relating to the language of Sindarin and the other to Quenya, respectively. It is quite unfortunate that those who wish to study J.R.R. Tolkien’s two primary invented languages, Quenya and Sindarin, have to go to great lengths in order to fill in certain gaps in vocabulary or grammar.
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Gabe BloomfieldThe use of tengwar can be adapted into the usage of many languages, both inside and outside Tolkien's mythos. A language for which no attempt to reconstruct the Tengwar has been made, as far as I know, is Latin. One could easily call a Tengwar reconstruction for Latin pointless, but one who says that is saying that all studies of Tolkien's languages are pointless, which is certainly not the case.
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Lena — October 2003This article provides a translation and an etymological analysis of well-nigh all Sindarin compounds occurring in Tolkien's Legendarium (from Abonnen to Umboth Muilin), including discussion regarding the equivalent of these names in the related languages, such as Quenya, Telerin or Nandorin.
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Michael Keegan — October 2003Many fans ofThe Lord of the Rings have also read The Silmarillion, which makes them painfully familiar with the great deeds of Fëanor, the greatest of the Elder Children. As important to the story as Fëanor is, Tolkien leaves many more things unsaid about his character and back-story than some fans would have liked.
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